Sooo, first KJ reacts to a position no one had put forth (is he hearing voices?).

And now he's making up his own version of history: "The movie The China Syndrome probably did more damage than all the "B" movies, because of the coincidental circumstances that it was being publicized while the Chernobyl disaster was happening."

China Syndrome movie: 1979Chernobyl: 1986

What's the use even trying to interact with such a delusional creature?

KaiserJeep wrote:The conclusion remains the same. Nuclear energy is the safest form of power generation by far. If Ibon built a dam for his Hydropower (not always necessary in the mountains) then he has a fairly dangerous power plant. But even my rooftop solar is 4400X more deadly than commercial nuclear power.

Some might be more concerned about the potential for harm, rather than the historical record of harm. Your rooftop solar probably has a limited potential to harm anyone, whereas a nuke, given the right circumstances (natural calamity, terrorism, etc) , can harm many. You can't always make decisions based only on what happened in the past.

That sounds nice as far as it goes, but Chernobyl was about as bad as a nuclear power accident can get and it killed under a hundred people. Coal and Natural Gas and Diesel pollute the air in a way that kills many asthmatic people every year, and can even induce asthma in people who have not had the condition from an early age.

Actually the main health impact is on metabological syndrome diseases such as heart disease. Impact on asthmatics is secondary. Fine mode aerosol (less than 100 nm) readily generated by diesel and gasoline exhaust (specifically insoluble soot particles which act as vectors for all sorts of nasty chemicals) penetrate easily through the lungs into the blood stream. Studies on rats have shown a dramatic effect of aerosol (and NOx) pollution on arterial plaques. Poor diet and lack of exercise explain only part of the plaque formation and it takes pollution to explain the observed levels of clogging. This pollution effect is clear from the heart disease intensity in residential areas close to major highway interchanges.

The China Syndrome was a variant of The Blob plot. The corium was treated as a coherent malign entity and not as an actual physical material. The reason that the corium has a hard time burrowing "to the other side of the planet" is that it mixes with the material that it encounters (concrete, soil, rock, etc.). Any neutron activity quickly attenuates due to the rapid drop in the neutron-active heavy isotope density. The original fuel bundles are created to enable a controlled neutron cascade and lots of energy is expended in purifying U-235 or extracting Pu-239 to achieve this. Once all sorts of other materials are added to the melted (after cooling failure) fuel bundles the neutron cascade is killed off quickly. Any burrowing is extremely self-limiting.

Yet due to fortuitous timing, the movie The China Syndrome was in it's theatrical run during the Three Mile Island incident. TMI predated both Chernobyl and Fukushima, and was the worst nuclear accident to have happened up until that time. The reactor core did melt at TMI, if you look online you will see pictures taken by robots inside the reactor vessel.

Because the emergency cooling system was functional, the adverse impact of TMI was limited to the venting of a modest amount of Tritium gas from the top of the reactor vessel. The vessel itself was never breached, and even had it done so, the containment structure was intact.

The Chernobyl implementation of emergency cooling was almost nonexistent, and once the fission reaction had blown open the graphite pile and exposed the hot carbon to air, it combusted and spread radioactivity without any containment whatsoever. In Fukushima, once the poorly designed emergency cooling was submerged in sea water by the Tsunami, there was no cooling whatsoever - yet containment succeeded, the only radioactivity spread was contaminated cooling water.

While it is true that nuclear energy generates some nasty high level wastes, there is so much power produced per unit of fuel that it hardly matters. Compare a nuclear plant to a coal plant of like power capacity:

Nuclear - during a 50 year life, will fill a cube 25 feet in size with spent fuel and one contaminated reactor core. With recycling of fuel, just the reactor core itself. If properly managed, zero radioactivity is released into the environment.

Coal - during a 50 year life will generate enough coal fly ash to bury five square miles to a depth of 25 feet - more than 44,600 times the amount of waste produced by the nuclear plant. Depending upon the source and mix of coal burned, the radioactives released by the combustion will exceed the radioactives (contained and not released) by the nuclear plant by a factor of 17X to 220X. Also present in coal stack effluents are heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium, and carcinogens in the partially burned hydrocarbons.

The carbon dioxide released by the nuclear plant is about 15% that of the coal plant. The nuclear plant doesn't release any in operation, but the fossil energy of plant fabrication, plus the fossil fuels used to mine and refine uranium, and to transport ore and fuel and spent fuel, accounts for the 15%.

To me, it seems a no-brainer. We should ban coal and build more nukes. We should recycle nuclear fuel, which will reduce the high level wastes to the reactor structure itself. We should strive to reduce overall energy consumption, and re-implement residential, industrial, and transportation infrastructure towards that same end.

But then, I am an engineer, and I do the math and believe the numbers. Other folks are afraid of Godzilla.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

There are a bunch of "Green" people who have opposed nuclear power generation since its inception. They must love coal, oil, and gas since they hate the one thing that does not contribute to global warming and is relatively safe, all things considered.

Cog wrote:There are a bunch of "Green" people who have opposed nuclear power generation since its inception. They must love coal, oil, and gas since they hate the one thing that does not contribute to global warming and is relatively safe, all things considered.

These specimens are irrational thinkers living in fear of nuclear and engaged in magical thinking. They are not making any rational evaluation such as the one you are pointing to. Magical thinkers are dangerous and given a chance would start burning "witches" at the stake.

Tanada, thanks for the youtube video I enjoyed the analogy of sunlight and radiation. What do you think is the possible damage from inhaled nuclear material, especially plutonium? Seems also to be overstated?

I have a friend, a real Left-Coast, New-Age Hippie Environmentalist and Artist. (she's quite good, has made a living as a professional wildlife artist) Here's the thing . . . she is a Wacko. Bona fide. Packed her kids up here in Humboldt, and fled to Mexico during the Fuki accident. Still won't eat Pacific seafood. Sleeps in a wire Faraday Cage. I sh@t you not. I know it's crazy, but it's endemic to our culture just not usually so obvious. She's a tough bright woman, has always followed her core beliefs. Hurts no one doing it. What can you say lol

EnergyUnlimited wrote:Nuclear energy is all fine, but doesn't do any good for Japanese.First 1945, then Fukushima, now (possibly) Kim.Everything looks very well until something goes pop!

And burning coal is more insane. Since without the pops, thousands of people die from the fallout of coal burning every month. Then there is the coup de grace waiting humanity in the near future as all the fossil fuel CO2 induced warming does in agriculture and general livability for mammals on the planet.

Not much went pop! by now.One in Ukraine, 3 in Japan and one pop! was mostly contained in US.It seems that odds for any given nuke reactor to go pop! is about 1% as globally about 500 are working.That is during time of prosperity.I suspect that during more difficult times which are coming right now about 5% will go pop! due to lack of resources for proper maintenance.And if we engage in nuke war, what looks more and more likely, most of them will go pop!On the top of it waste storage sites will go splash!Regarding CO2, I agree. But you see, our entire civilization is bound to go pop!If not because of nukes then because of GW and if not because of GW then because of overshoot and resource depletion and if not because of resource depletion then because of progress of medicine and associate genetic degeneration compounded by superbugs and other nicieties alike.Ever wondered about Fermi paradox?

EnergyUnlimited wrote:Not much went pop! by now.One in Ukraine, 3 in Japan and one pop! was mostly contained in US.It seems that odds for any given nuke reactor to go pop! is about 1% as globally about 500 are working.That is during time of prosperity.I suspect that during more difficult times which are coming right now about 5% will go pop! due to lack of resources for proper maintenance.And if we engage in nuke war, what looks more and more likely, most of them will go pop!On the top of it waste storage sites will go splash!Regarding CO2, I agree. But you see, our entire civilization is bound to go pop!If not because of nukes then because of GW and if not because of GW then because of overshoot and resource depletion and if not because of resource depletion then because of progress of medicine and associate genetic degeneration compounded by superbugs and other nicieties alike.Ever wondered about Fermi paradox?

Maybe my memory's getting fuzzy but thought you used to be a cornucopie?

jupiters_release wrote:Maybe my memory's getting fuzzy but thought you used to be a cornucopie?

Not full cornucopian but I was holding middlegrounds.Cornucopians were peoples like lorenzo or carlhole/rune.I believed that many things are fixable with some efforts and orderly powerdown is possible.After these 10 years I concluded that most of approaches taken by now have failure designed in.It seems that our policy makers are rather unintelligent and Western societies are going to succumb to chaos.

Don’t mind the cloud of radioactive pollution floating over Europe – it’s harmless, the French nuclear safety institute IRSN said Thursday. Officials in Europe said they began detecting unusually high levels of ruthenium 106, a radioactive atom that does not occur naturally, near France in the last week of September. The IRSN immediately “mobilized all its means of radiological monitoring of the atmosphere and conducted regular analysis of the filters from its monitoring stations,” the agency said in a press release. IRSN director Jean-Marc Peres told Reuters that the leak likely came from a nuclear fuel treatment site or center for radioactive medicine in Russia or Kazakhstan, not a nuclear reactor. The radioactive cloud poses only an “extremely low” risk of contaminating mushrooms and other foodstuffs that are imported into France, the IRSN said in a statement. “The potential health risk associated with this scenario

People have got to get over this insane quaking fear every time some media gnat uses the word radiation or radioactivity.

II Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.